What Others Are Saying

June 23, 2008

Now that Michelle and Barack Obama have introduced millions of Americans to the concept of the "pound" ... it's time for the bad news: You can't do it ever. ... We beg of you, whether you're black or white, young or old, if the first attempted pound of your life occurred in the last three weeks, you get one freebie and that's it. Otherwise you're the guy who was still saying "fo' shizzle" in 2007. And you don't wanna be that guy.

--Devin Gordon, Newsweek

Listen closely to all those cheers for newly crowned nominee Barack Obama, and in the background you'll catch the notes of a funeral march. Resting, if not in peace, are the New Democrats.

The Illinois senator's primary victory marked the end of many things, and one looks to be his party's 20-year experiment with ideological centrism. The New Dems are still out there, still urging their party to fight its natural liberal instincts. But who's listening? Buoyed by the Republican implosion, wild for their retro nominee, the intellectual soul of the Democratic Party is now firmly left.

--Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal

Competitions among grievances do not ennoble, and both Clinton and Obama strove to avoid one; but it does not belittle the oppressions of gender to suggest that in America the oppressions of race have cut deeper. Clinton's supporters would sometimes note that the Constitution did not extend the vote to women until a half century after it extended it to men of color. But there is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of "the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil" that preceded it.

--Hendrik Herztberg, New Yorker

Are there feminist Hillary supporters who hate Obama so much they'll vote for McCain just to show the Democratic Party how ticked off they are? Yes, and I get e-mails from all five of them.

Seriously, I'm sure there are female Hillary Clinton voters who will go for John McCain in the general election, but I don't think too many of them will be feminists. Because to vote for McCain, a feminist would have to be insane. Let me rephrase that: She would have to believe that the chief -- indeed the only -- goal of the women's movement is to elect Clinton, not to promote women's rights. A vote for McCain would be the ultimate face-spiting nose-cutoff. Take that, women's equality!